Last summer, ESPN2 offered viewers the opportunity to spectate an event distinctly incongruous with its usual sport offerings and yet yawn-inducingly familiar: spreadsheet calculation. The ESPN family of channels is no stranger to unconventional programming, with events like the Scrabble Players Championship, Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, and the World’s Strongest Man Competition. But even by its own standards, the channel had seemingly outdone itself with a half-hour programming slot devoted to the 2022 World Excel Championships. Part of the Financial Modeling World Cup and sponsored by the likes of Microsoft and AG Capital, the event pitted eight Excel wizards against each other to see who could solve tasks most efficiently with table fills and complex formulas under the pressure of a ticking clock. The event has only continued to grow: ESPNU has since broadcast the collegiate equivalent, and the 2023 version will be aired by the ESPN family and held live in Las Vegas with over $15,000 in prize money to boot.

Microsoft Excel—the famed spreadsheet application with number-crunching and graphing capabilities—is the defining software of the white-collar workplace. Canonically categorized as “office productivity software,” its spreadsheet interface can be found on desktop monitors throughout commercials and TV shows as a staple of the cubicle. Along with its siblings Word and PowerPoint, Excel is the basis for curriculum material in schools and universities, a topic of academic research (which has concluded the software is “pervasive in businesses of all sizes”), and the subject of a quite simply enormous subreddit: r/excel boasts over 600,000 “spreadsheet warriors.” Somehow, Excel has also become so ubiquitous as to be recognized as a compelling setting for esports.

Though the practice of maintaining bookkeeping and ledger records dates back to ancient Mesopotamia, physical spreadsheet records have always suffered from the problem of requiring corrections and updates by hand. In 1978, while completing assignments at Harvard Business School, MBA student Dan Bricklin recognized the potential for streamlining these calculation inefficiencies using the personal computer. “If only I had a magic piece of paper where I could change a number at the beginning of a set of calculations, and have all of the other numbers automatically recompute themselves …,” he recounted in a course paper. “If only I had an electronic spreadsheet.” Bricklin and his business partner, Bob Frankston, would release VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet software for the personal computer, in 1979. Within a few years, the software would become the most widely used business program for the personal computer to date. Steve Jobs himself quipped that the software “propelled the Apple II to the success it achieved more than any other single event.”

Spreadsheet software was thus a major draw to the personal computer—not simply for “personal” use but rather for business applications and interests. VisiCalc would eventually lose its market dominance to Lotus 1-2-3, new spreadsheet software for the IBM personal computer marketed with additional bells and whistles. Released in 1983, Lotus 1-2-3 would employ new, three-in-one functionality: In addition to spreadsheet manipulation routines (#1), the software would incorporate graphing capabilities (#2) and database functionality (#3), putting the “1-2-3” in the spreadsheet software’s moniker.

To whom was Lotus 1-2-3 marketed? A commercial for the software featuring dancing office workers provides a clear answer. “I never really worked this fast before / Doing things fast means I can do more / Whoever thought that I could do so much? / And all I needed was the Lotus touch!” sings a bespectacled employee now liberated from the error-prone spreadsheet software he had been struggling with at his desk. “Don’t have a lot of time to waste / Looking all around for my database / With this speed, work gets done / It’s time to rock / Time for fun!” proclaims his effusive boss, thrilled at the prospect of optimizing his workers’ time on the clock.

Though Microsoft is now synonymous with Excel, the company’s first foray into spreadsheet software was with the software Multiplan, which launched in 1982 and failed to capture meaningful market share. Microsoft Excel would debut in 1985 on the Apple Macintosh, with which Lotus 1-2-3 was not compatible. As described by Daniel Power in “A History of Microcomputer Spreadsheets,” Excel’s graphical user interface, controlled using a mouse, provided a more intuitive user experience than the command line interfaces employed by most existing spreadsheet programs. However, it was the next version of Excel—compatible with the Windows operating system—that would differentiate the spreadsheet software from Lotus 1-2-3: Excel was the only spreadsheet software available on Windows for many years. Though other competitors have emerged over the decades with new functionalities and strengths (for example, Google Sheets for collaborative work, Tableau for advanced data visualization, and LibreOffice’s Calc from the open source community), Excel continues to dominate the landscape of spreadsheet software almost 40 years later.